It's the week before the holidays and all through the tech world barely a mouse has been stirring: but one of the Winklevoss twins did take some time out from Christmas shopping to let everyone know that they should be buying Bitcoins.
Cameron Winklevoss told Redditors:
Small bull case scenario for Bitcoin is a $400bn market …

COMMENTS

The difference between a futurist and a futurologist

I always thought that Futurologists were like Hari Seldon and futurists were like Kevin Warrick at his worst.

One makes scientific predictions and tries to use less assumptions/ more data to predict likelihoods with timescales, whilst the other churns out very nebulous statements based on popular trends and full of gaps in technology progression.

Futurologist = "By the end of $decade, we will likely have a variation on $theory to enable a system of global communication. Likely candidates for the tech used will be $tech. This could be exciting"

Futurist = "in the future, we will have the ability to communicate with the rest of the world and it'll be awesome, but I have no real details. That's small stuff."

Ah that brings back embarrassing memories from Plymouth Polytechnic in the 80s. Me and a friend used to punish users who didn't set a password on their account by creating the files '*' and '-rf' in their home directory. I don't even know if anyone ever fell for it. With the maturity gained from a quarter century of living I rather hope they didn't.

As for emailing them a file with ^Z in it to drop the BBC micros out of terminal mode and leave the user at a BASIC prompt - well, that I do still consider to be rather humorous. About on par with sending the sequence to put the Beeb into Mode 2.

Whitespace is significant

sudo rm -rf/* has no effect at all, other than issuing a diagnostic, if you have a POSIX-compliant rm.1 If you're running some ancient version of rm, and you have a directory named -rf in the current directory, then you'd lose some files.

sudo rm -rf /*, on the other hand... But the asterisk is redundant. sudo rm -rf / will ultimately have the same effect;2 it'll just pass a single filespec to rm rather than a list of them. The order in which rm descends subdirectories will also likely be different, but eventually it'll all be over but the weeping.

It's hard to believe the experts on 4chan would get that wrong.

1Since word-splitting and wildcard expansion are handled by the shell, it's conceivable someone could write a shell that decided -rf/* should be split at the / and expanded. No standard shell does that, and it would be stupid, which means someone's probably written such a shell.

2Assuming there are any files in the root directory - otherwise the wildcard expansion of /* would fail, so the former command either wouldn't be executed, or would be executed with a filespec that didn't match anything, depending on the shell.